Review: Virtua Fighter 2 - Virtual Butt Kicking

Overview

Sega is firing on all cylinders as Virtua Fighter 2 is yet another in the long line of iOS ports of classic Sega games.

Features

Virtua Fighter 2 contains an emulated version of Virtua Fighter 2 Genesis, but no bells and whistles or Game Center support of any kind.

The Good

Virtua Fighter 2 genesis is a reasonable fighter, with a fair section of characters, a good number of moves.
The game is ported to iOS quite well. The frame rate is solid, the animations look just as they did on the genesis and the controls work quite well.

The Bad

First things first: this is a port of the GENESIS (aka Megadrive) version of Virtua Fighter 2, not the Saturn version. The genesis version of VF2 was a severely pared down version that was necessarily shrunk down to fit on a 16bit system, rather than the 32bit Saturn and features such delights as missing characters, less moves and much poorer graphics. The Genesis port is considered by all to be vastly inferior to the Saturn version and you should know what you are getting into before you buy this game.
Really it’s a mystery why Sega chose the incredibly inferior Genesis version. The Saturn and arcade versions feature 3d graphics, a larger roster of characters, better music and more moves. The Genesis one is worse in every conceivable way and it’s a real wonder why Sega didn’t port one of the vastly superior versions of this otherwise much loved game.
VF2 suffers from a lack of depth. There are only 8 fighters and the only VS mode is via Bluetooth. Once you finish the single player mode once, there is no real reason to play it again, as the game lacks any other mode besides arcade and VS and it also lacks Game Centre achievements of any kind. The game features dozens of moves, but the total lack of a movelist and the fact lots of the moves use pretty complex movements, makes it less likely you’ll take the time to learn them and more likely you’ll just mash the punch and kick buttons and hope for the best. Kicks also seem too powerful and knock fighters over way too often.
The sound is also pretty terrible, even considering the game’s age. Some effects like fighters hitting the ground sound distorted and the music is mostly quite poor.
Controls are sloppy and the lack of tactile feedback makes executing moves much harder than it should be.

The Verdict

VF2 is another supremely average port of a game that was never a classic and is absolutely not worth buying, for any reason. It’s way too primitive, shoddy and disappointing to warrant a purchase.